"...you don't get to use the influence of government to help promote your cult."

I shouldn't drink my morning coffee while reading P.Z. Myers. I almost choked. Myers, avant garde of the cult of atheism, commented on Delaware Senate candidate Christine O'Donnell's observation that the First Amendment contains no phrase "separation of church and state."

Myers:

This is a fairly common talking point among lunatics of the far right. It is literally true that the phrase "separation of church and state" is not in the constitution...

Correct. The phrase "separation of church and state" isn't in the Constitution, and "lunatics of the far right" are indeed passionate about discussing the First Amendment accurately. Myers, a man most decidely not of the far right, then accurately quotes the First Amendment:

"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof"

And Myers adds

[which] means you don't get to use the influence of government to help promote your cult."

Myers is being refreshingly honest here. You certainly don't get to use the First Amendment to promote your cult, but Myers unequivocally gets to use the First Amendment to promote his cult.

For the past half-century, atheists, a "science"-obsessed fringe who claim magician The Amazing Randi as a patriarch, argue endlessly about whether to call themselves "Brights" (disappointed no doubt that the name "Scientologists" is already taken), and whose adherents are three times as likely to believe in Bigfoot, UFO's and the Lost Continent of Atlantis than are traditionally religious Americans, have litigated with a fury that would make the (usurping) Scientologists envious. Atheists' one goal: to insulate Darwinism -- the theory that life arose without design or purpose -- from any scrutiny of any sort by public schoolchildren. Darwinism has been promoted by atheists as a fact, on a par with gravity or heliocentrism, and atheist public school censors have insisted that it is a scientific theory fact without weakness.

Atheists have taken a cudgel to educational curricula that merely propose to teach schoolchildren the strengths and weakness of Darwin's theory. Atheists explain: The Founder's Darwin's theory has no weakness.

The deep irony in Myers' comment is that atheists have used the First Amendment itself, which they mischaracterize as demanding "a wall of separation between church and state," to promote their cult in public schools. In the atheist creed, questions about Darwinian weaknesses, let alone inferences to design in biology, comprise a heretic "church," and any challenges or even critical questions about Darwinism must be expunged from school curricula.

And so the atheist cult survives, skimming new recruits from a public school system in which children are harnessed to a dozen years of indoctrination in atheism's creation myth.

Misrepresentation of the First Amendment, which was intended to prohibit government enforcement of orthodoxy and to protect free inquiry, has been atheists' primary cudgel to suppress challenges to their cult in public schools.

Atheists' malicious litigation and suppression of honest discussion of Darwin's theory in classrooms bankrupts school districts and is evoking the ire of millions of Americans, but it sure beats passing out literature in airports.